Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/15/why-everyones-talking-about.html
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I had sort of seen this movie mentioned here and there but dismissed it as something i probably wouldn’t be interested in. Thanks for posting your thoughts and does give me more of an idea about it, i think i would enjoy it 
will probably watch it over the weekend.
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Why can’t I ever get stuck in one of these time loops?
Well, I guess it depends where I get stuck. Waking up in the dentist’s office during a root canal might not be optimum.
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OK I’ve got some questions about the mechanics of this time loop.
Once you enter the cave, you wake back up where you awoke that morning, starting the loop.
While in the loop, you reset it back to that same point by:
- Dying
- Going back through the cave
- Falling asleep
I don’t think it’s really dwelled on, but I assume there’s an asterisk on “falling asleep” that it must be after midnight or some other point — maybe it’s a solid 24 hours; doesn’t matter.
That works well enough when there’s one person, but I’m really curious how the reset works now that we’ve got multiple people in the loop.
Say Andy and Cristin are both up late, together. At some point he falls asleep, presumably resetting his loop. What does Cristin experience, though? Does Andy as she sees him simply vanish? If she were to wake him up at this point, what would he be like? Would he revert to the “no knowledge of the time loop” Andy that JK experiences at the very end after Andy escapes?
If none of that happens, could two people avoid resetting the loop by taking turns waking each other up?
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This is an interesting debate, actually. What is the ideal time loop location and time of year?
If you like the outdoors, it’d probably be some place near enough to the coast that you’d have beaches a short drive away, but inland enough that you’d have access to mountains. North Carolina is a good option!
Sacramento is another good option, with the SF Bay a short drive, as well as a few hours away from Lake Tahoe.
What is the ideal location if you love live music, I wonder? NYC? NOLA?
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You’re bringing logic to a fiction predicated on the suspension of disbelief. Just suspend it, man, suspend it and go with the flow. 
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I’d argue that the film establishes that the time loop is a non-magical process that’s understandable with enough science (and indeed, that’s exactly how the characters manage to escape it) so there do exist rules describing how it functions.
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I think that word means something different in a fictionalised, disbelief-suspended, Hollywoodland, make-believe, rom[p]-com, compared to what it means in the real world. Somewhere, there will be a ‘miracle happens here’ discontinuity in them ‘rules’, for sure.
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I enjoyed this movie a bit more than I thought I would. They did a pretty solid job at taking well-tread tropes and making them feel fresh. Don’t want to spoil anything, so can’t say much more than it was a pretty funny movie, and we highly enjoyed.
I think it’s probably just like sleep/waking. The one person goes to sleep, and the next moment of consciousness thought/experience is waking at the beginning of the loop. It doesn’t matter how long the other person waits to fall asleep, they will both “wake” in the next loop. I think your question about disappearing is answered by the (was it post-credits?) where Roy meets the Andy in his loop, which is not actually the Andy we know. I feel like that’s a clue, that there are both conscious and NPC versions of the people, with and without the “prime consciousness” in them.
Just my interpretation though.
The one thing that gives me pause about the memory-reset idea, is that in the credits sequence, Roy is interacting with an Andy who was never in the loop — he existed the day before in his normal state, just like they all did, but then never acquired his loop memories.
But how would that work in this woken-up situation? Would the person reset to their pre-loop memories, but also lose the entire day? In their experience, they went to sleep in bed but then found themselves woken up by a stranger, a day later, in a new location?
Yeah, I think this is answered by the mid-credits scene with Roy. If Nyles and Sarah both tried staying up late beyond 24 hours, and, say, Nyles fell asleep first, Sarah would continue to exist and gain new memories until she, too, finally fell asleep. Sleeping Nyles would just wake up the same morning at the top of the time loop; but so would Sarah, despite having a few extra hours to herself. It’s the same thing that would happen if one of them died before the end of the 24 hours.
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I loved Russian Doll and just finished Dark which I really enjoyed as well. I will give this a watch after I complete season 4 of The Expanse.
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I liked it. Pleasant, funny and sweet. Sandberg is fine, and Milioti, of course, brings her charisma to the film. She’s the Millennial version of Gen X indy queen Parker Posey.
Plus I gotta put a word in for Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. It’s delightful. Don’t read the reviews. I have no clue where most of the reviewers got the “interesting in spots, but too many story lulls” narrative. The movie engaged my wife and I the whole time.
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Good point. I’ll add, too, that I wonder how they eat and sleep, and other science facts? What should I repeat to myself?
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I kind of thought of it as forked realities, where each new day was a separate alternate reality that started from the first morning of when you entered the tunnel. Once you enter the tunnel, your conscience somehow gets carried from one dimension to the next indefinitely so you keep your memory intact while you relive the same day over and over. So in this sense it’s not time looping, and why there can be two Andy Sambergs at the same time living different realities.
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With my luck, I’d wake up on a day I was hung over and spend eternity feeling like crap.
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Think Groundhog Day meets whatever these nihilist bone bags eat up these days… Harold Ramos would love to see the state of recycled comedy today.
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The elevator pitch for Palm Springs is essentially Groundhog’s Day meets Hot Tub Time Machine meets Wedding Crashers — again, not the type of film you’d expect to garner such critical acclaim.
Groundhog Day is a bona fide masterpiece (96% at RT) and the other two had good-to-great critical reception (63% and 75%, respectively). Why wouldn’t you expect a movie combining elements of three critically-acclaimed movies to receive critical acclaim?
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Good point. Plus the solution is definitely more well-thought-out that Marvel comic book film physics.
Palm Springs followed by Vivarium made for a weird double feature recently.
